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Friday, October 10, 2014

`Infelicity Is Involved in Corporeal Nature'

“If
Johnson had been able to `feed on a fellowship,’ he would probably have written
nothing except a few sermons, and lived life in a twilight of reputation.”

Rewarding
scholarship sounds like a capital idea. In engineering, the academic preserve I
know most intimately, promising student engineers are rewarded with fellowships
to underwrite their research. Ideally, they grow as scholars, knowledge deepens,
we all benefit. The story in the softer realms – art history, English,
psychology – is less certain.

The
observation above is drawn from a piece written in 1959 by John Wain (1925-1994)
on the occasion of Dr. Johnson’s 250th birthday and collected in Essays on Literature and Ideas
(Macmillan and Co., 1963). Wain, who would publish his biography of Johnson in
1974, is referring to a remark Johnson made about a fellow student, Jack Meeke,
during his one-year stay at Oxford University: “About the same time of life,
Meeke was left behind at Oxford to feed on a fellowship, and I went to London
to get my living; now, Sir, see the difference of our literary characters!”
Johnson can be forgiven his unseemly show of braggadocio. As he writes in “The Vanity of Human Wishes”:

“When
first the College Rolls receive his Name,

The
young Enthusiast quits his Ease for Fame;

Resistless
burns the fever of Renown,

Caught
from the strong Contagion of the Gown;

O'er
Bodley's Dome his future Labours spread,

And
Bacon's Mansion trembles o’er his Head.”

In
the writer we sense a strong identification with his subject. Like Johnson (and
Shakespeare and Arnold Bennett, about whom he also wrote books), Wain was born
in a small Midlands town. Neither was born to privilege. Both wrote and lived
by their writing. Johnson, he says in the biography, “loved the university, but
irritably shrugged off the claims of authority.”(I quote this as a former
university dropout who earned his degree on the installment plan, thirty years
after my contemporaries.) One feels perfectly at home admiring Johnson because
he is so much like us, but more so. His sufferings and weaknesses we recognize
and his genius is so essentially human, a state he never transcends. Wain
quotes The Rambler #32 with approval:

“The
cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.
Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature, and interwoven with our being; all
attempts therefore to decline it wholly are useless and vain: the armies of
pain send their arrows against us on every side, the choice is only between
those which are more or less sharp, or tinged with poison of greater or less
malignity; and the strongest armour which reason can supply, will only blunt
their points, but cannot repel them.”

Wain
writes:

“Johnson’s
whole way of life, as well as his intellectual position, can be deduced from
that passage. Human suffering could be met, but only my putting on armour
supplied by `reason,’ and taking reasonable advantage of the `palliative’
cures, innocent diversions which enabled a man to forget his unhappiness. No
one ever threw himselfinto blameless
enjoyments with more zest than Johnson, who loved a good dinner and an evening’s
talk so well that he declared `a good tavern or inn’ the happiest invention of
the human mind.”